How does traditional machining break through the dilemma?
The market share of injection caps is gradually expanding, and with the increasing appearance demand of consumers, the role of bottle caps is not only reflected in the sealing, they pay more attention to the appearance of products, such as modeling, refinement, finish and so on. It is bound to have an impact on the production technology of the bottle cap. How to improve the production efficiency while ensuring the quality has become a technical problem in the manufacture of the bottle cap mould.
Suction machine will be mixed material into the injection molding machine barrel, heated in the barrel to melt and plasticize state, injected into the mold cavity, cooling in the cavity, demoulding, and then through the ring cutting pad, to complete the injection molding production, this is the injection molding cover production process. So cooling shaping becomes an important part of the molding time of injection products. The cooling water channel is an important part of the mold. Cap quality, speed, mostly depends on cooling water.
In the traditional mold, the cooling waterway is generally processed by CNC, and the cooling waterway can only be processed by the way of drilling through the milling machine to produce the internal waterway network, and through the internal water stop and external plug way to adjust the waterway flow. This leads to the layout of the waterway has great limitations, the waterway can only be cylindrical straight holes, unable to turn around in the mold cavity. When the mold products with complex shapes are encountered, the traditional waterway can not be completely close to the surface of the injection parts, the cooling efficiency is low and the cooling is uneven, resulting in a long injection cycle and large product deformation.
Figure 1:3D model of a traditional waterway
In the beginning of the production of drinks and other plastic caps and claw caps, the traditional waterway is still competent, but with the product packaging more complex, the shape of the cap is more and more unique, uneven shape, resulting in the cooling effect of the traditional waterway is limited.
A New journey: Opportunities for 3D printing to gain innovation
However, with the development of 3D printing technology, especially metal 3D printing (SLM, selective laser melting) technology has been quite mature, and SLM technology has been widely used in aerospace and medical manufacturing industry. In the aerospace sector, GE has verified 35 percent of 3D-printed parts with the verification aircraft, and the C919 has used 3D printed parts on a large scale.
And the bottle cap mold technology, also because of 3D printing ushered in a new life. 3D printing technology, also known as additive manufacturing, is a technology that manufactures solid parts by adding materials layer by layer. Compared with traditional material removal and cutting processing technology, additive manufacturing is a manufacturing method “from scratch”.
For cosmetic bottle caps, this layer by layer 3D printing technology can create an all-powerful cooling water – depending on the shape of the water, it can change according to the shape of the product, anywhere in the mold cavity, there will be no cooling blind spots inside the mold. (as shown below)
Figure 2:3D model and side section of the shaped waterway
Using this water channel, it can make the bottle cap can speed up the cooling speed, shorten the molding cycle of the product, in addition, the cooling balance, reduce product defects, improve product yield.
But can this technological innovation really bring such an advantage to the enterprise? Many people are taking a wait-and-see attitude. In the situation that the author understands, since 2015 through this technology to do mold enterprises spring up one after another, but the quality is uneven, difficult to identify, but whether the enterprise can go to the last or the key to test – technology!
During the three years from 2018 to 2020, there was an enterprise that accumulated a lot and rose against the tide. With their far-sighted strategic vision,
In 2007, Shanghai Yishu Laser Technology Co., Ltd. was established. Through the development and application of 3D printing technology, it is committed to the research and development of injection mold cutting-edge technology, taking the lead in the research of this technology.
Aiming at the two kinds of water channels for the current cosmetics bottle cap mold: traditional water way and following water way, the fast mold flow analyst used Autodesk Moldflow software to analyze the data of the cosmetic bottle cap in the two kinds of water way: insert temperature, cooling time, mold temperature state, etc. To find out if the following waterways really do have a magic effect.
